Abstract

Historically, "transcendence" has been treated by philosophers and others as a selfless experience in which individual personality is submerged, and consciousness is pervaded by impersonal awareness, a heightened sense of reality, expanded perception, or unification with "the infinite" in which subjectivity and its conceptual errors are overcome. ;The philosophy of William James celebrates subjectivity, emphasizing its ultimate resistance to verbal objectification and recognizing the integrity of individual experience as it is subjectively apprehended ... no matter how odd or elusive it may seem from a more objective point of view. ;But James also proposes, with his radical empiricism, that we acknowledge in our philosophizing a category of experience which is neither subjective nor objective, but is "pure" of such conceptual discriminations. Pure experience is impersonal, apparently, in the fashion of transcendence as traditionally understood. ;It might seem most likely, then, that if James has anything important to say about transcendence it will come out of his philosophy of pure experience rather than from his celebratory affirmation of subjectivity per se. ;My thesis, to the contrary, is that James is an advocate for a type of personal transcendence which owes at least as much to subjectivity as to pure experience, and which underscores the value of continuity in philosophy as well as life. ;The importance of my thesis to James scholars, beyond whatever value there may be in showing that James has a philosophy of transcendence, and that it sits more-or-less comfortably with the rest of his philosophy, is that it adds an increment of clarity to the always troublesome and problematic concept of pure experience. Its greatest potential importance, however, is not to scholars alone but to all of us. It urges the application of a long, but too long neglected, American tradition in philosophy--including Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and Dewey--to issues of vital contemporary interest. Jamesian transcendence offers the promise of an enriched personal life coordinate with respect for others, and in this holds universal appeal